All Things Plame

(This, incidentally, is my 4,000th post. Go read them all if you have a spare week and a half.)

One thing about Valerie Plame, she's a fighter. Despite suffering all the slander from the right, the end of the career for which she was trained, heaps of abuse, she's still as strong as ever.

Valerie Wilson, the former Central Intelligence Agency operative at the heart of an investigation that reached into the White House, sued the agency in federal court in New York today over its refusal to allow her to publish a memoir that would discuss how long she worked for it.

Although that information is set out in an unclassified letter to Ms. Wilson that has been published in the Congressional Record, the C.I.A. insists that her dates of service remain classified and may not be mentioned in “Fair Game,” the memoir Ms. Wilson hopes to publish in October.

Agency employees sign agreements requiring them to submit manuscripts to the agency for permission before they are published.. Ms. Wilson’s suit said she worked with agency officials for 10 months to avoid disclosing national security information. But the agency’s refusal to allow her to include material already in the public domain, the suit said, violates her right to free speech.

The CIA is in different hands than when Plame worked there, remember, and this is a textbook case of bureaucratic incompetence. They said that they sent Plame a letter with her dates of employment by mistake. The information, then, is public BUT classified at the same time. There's probably a good deal of political pressure to keep this book off of the shelves, as well.

Meanwhile, the judge involved in sentencing will make public all of the panty-sniffing letters sent by the conservative movement on Libby's behalf, so we'll be able to see out in the open their love for a criminal. Here's a sample, from Libby's lawyers:

Prosecutors want Libby to serve up to three years in prison for lying about his conversations with reporters regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose 2003 outing touched off a leak investigation.

Libby's lawyers said Thursday would be unfair. Citing numerous letters from former colleagues and friends, they said Libby deserved only probation.

"His dedication to promoting freedom abroad and keeping American citizens safe at home is beyond question," the attorneys wrote [...]

One letter quoted by Libby's attorneys, from a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: "I always came away from our encounters thinking how lucky the country was to have someone of his caliber helping think through the great security challenges we all faced."

How lucky indeed to have someone so angry at criticism that he goes after the critic's family the way the Mafia would. How lucky to have someone who believes national security should be defined by his ideological beliefs alone.

And just to put a cap on this sorry episode, read this bit from leading intellectual light Glenn Reynolds, who pretty much admits that nothing in the insaneosphere is true at all.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Just talked to a reporter from Salon who wanted to know if I was going to "retract" an earlier blog post in which I said it looked as if Plame wasn't covert. I noted that one normally issues a retraction for original reporting, not commenting upon other people's news stories.

In other words, I don't have to be responsible for anything I say, nor does anyone else on the right, because we just comment on other people's news stories. That's the dedication to the truth we've come to expect from the insaneosphere.